Saw Elysium tonight. It was pretty great. The original plan was to do some grinding in Demon Gaze or Bravely Default, but I completely forgot about that because it kept me completely in the moment throughout. I thought the plot was really balanced--always moving forward but never feeling like just an excuse to tie action scenes together--and the talent were all excellent in their roles. A lot of the people I talk to have said in the past that they liked Elysium, but not as much as District 9. I have to say I liked Elysium more simply because it felt so much bigger than District 9.

The Wedding Singer. Easily Adam Sandler's best. Well, comedy anyway. Reign Over Me is the top drama. It's super funny and just a great feel-good flick. Drew Barrymore is also incredibly hot in this movie:)

Just saw Divergent tonight and I LOVED it! In looking at the genre of fiction it's in, like with Hunger Games and all, I enjoyed Divergent a LOT more. It just resonated with me more strongly and I thought the film itself was better put together than either of the Hunger Games films. I enjoyed Tris as a protagonist (though my favorite character was probably Christina whom Zoe Kravitz played very well), the visual design was killer, and the music was pretty solid too. The movie was long, but the pacing was immaculate.

I want to read the books now. Moreso than the Hunger Games books. It's interesting seeing the themes in young adult fiction like this. Like how stuff like Divergent or Hunger Games may be the 1984, Fahrenheit 451, or Brave New World for this generation of youths.

I look forward to the next Divergent movie.

In terms of trailers, I'm not interested at all in Maze Runner, but I am intrigued by Jupiter Ascending. The latter interests me because it's a "film" film and not a film based on a comic or a novel or something like that.

Of course:P You've just bought into what the establishment wants you to believe. It's kinda like with the American dream of a car in your garage and a chicken in your pot. It's the dream you buy into because it's what the establishment tells you the dream is and is supposed to be. And do you think the propaganda will tell us plebians the downsides to their manufactured utopia?

And even then, is the whole faction system in Divergent such a silly premise? It's happened in the real world. Namely, the caste system in early India. And even though that doesn't exist any more, that's still viscerally ingrained in our cultural being.

It's not that the concept of a faction/caste system seemed silly - it's the specific implementation as I understood it to be in this series. What I had seen in trailers and read on the books' dust jackets is that there are five factions, all of which are positive, and essentially EVERYONE falls into one of those factions when they're tested. If you don't, it's so unusual that the system has no way to handle it, so you have to somehow hide your failure or you will be killed, and FYI, you're probably not going to pull it off. And I couldn't understand how that would work.

Really enjoyed Amazing Spider Man 2. I know that a lot of people are complaining about the pacing, but it didn't bother me. I love the characters in the movie, the fights were good, and I really don't have any complaints about it. It probably could have been better had Harry been introduced in 1, and I'm sure it could have been tweaked to improve it some, but I still enjoyed it on the whole. I think I preferred Amazing Spider Man 1 to this one, but I would still rank this as the second best Spider Man I have seen.

Captain America 2 was good. However some of the action scenes were just soooooo freaking choppy. I nearly got a headache during the first fist fight between Captain America and the Winter Soldier because I could see skips between frames and ugh.

Another analogy about the Divergent faction premise. It's not a far stretch from schools administering personality and career aptitude tests to give someone an idea of what job, career path, or college major they'd be be best suited for. Essentially, you take a futuristic equivalent of a Myers-Briggs test (you know INTJ, ESFP) and once you're locked into a personality type, you join the faction best suited to said personality profile. Then you take another battery of tests within that faction to determine what your job would be. And since certain jobs are only available to certain factions, is that any different than some jobs only being available to people with specific degrees and/or skillsets nowadays? And while you have the choice to defy the career aptitude test and decide to be "what you want to be," you ain't gonna get far in becoming an astronaut if you're barely passing remedial algebra.

Basically, all I'm saying is that the premise of Divergent's world is actually fairly well grounded in the past and present of humanity (e.g. personality tests, caste system). And besides, who hasn't asked themselves "who am I? What am I?" like a JRPG hero and wished there was some kind of helmet you could put on that tells you "this is what you should do." Heck, I'm sure most of us are adults and STILL don't know what we should be doing with our lives.